In Which We Await Spring and RAGBRAI Training

Tuesday morning--first bike ride since Spring Break. Foggy, dark, damp morning--running with lights on. Fancy Beast in background.

I got a message via the Messenger app on my phone yesterday: My brother-in-law was reminding me that the deadline to register for RAGBRAI is upon us. I promised to register later that day, and Wednesday evening I made good.

I’m in the lottery. We’ll see if the village pulls my name out and stones me. Oh, wait—not that lottery.

It’s been a heck of a week. It’s good to be back home and bad to be back home. Jet lag is a real thing, as the return from just a week in England is proving to your fuzzy brained biking correspondent. The spring break trip to the UK was totally worth it, but I am paying the price this week.

And, it rained Monday, so I drove the Dodge.

But, luckily, I’ve been biking ever since, and experiencing the dramatic weather changes Iowa offers at this time of year.

Snow fell in Iowa Saturday, the day before my wife and I jetted across the pond. By all accounts (and the amount of white stuff slowly turning to water on the ground), quite a bit of snow.

Tuesday morning it still looked damp out, but nothing was falling from the sky, so I got out the winter beater bike. The Fancy Beast was quite nice to ride, except for on a stretch of sidewalk on C Avenue that, days after the snow, was still a frozen, frosty snowscape. I bogged down and had a sloshy walk—later sending a complaint email to the City of Cedar Rapids.

I know that sidewalk was new last fall, but come on, business park at the corner of C Avenue and Collins Road, shovel your walk.

Sidewalk that also serves as bike route on C Avenue. I'm an Iowan, so snow doesn't always make me sad. But it does make me sad when it's on a bike route.

Wednesday morning was cooler, but also sunnier. I still rode the Fancy Beast, figuring that I would encounter some snow on the sidewalk. Fortunately, by the Wednesday ride home, it appeared that ambient radiation from a nearby star had caused a state change in matter on the pavement—the solid sidewalk snow was now a liquid.

Wednesday--still very cool, but a clearly more pleasant spring day. Parked at bike rack near library at MMU.

So this morning, I decided it was time for the hybrid bike, my main commuting bike. I don’t mind riding the Fancy Beast, but a mountain bike is a mountain bike, and a hybrid is a lot more fun to ride, if you’re riding on pavement.

As it turned out, the strategy seemed to work. The morning commute was foggy and cool, but also largely dry. The only snow-related glitch was that the bike rack behind Warde Hall was still blocked by snow, a problem I solved simply by parking Clarence on the “wrong” side of the rack.

Spring! Let’s see more warm sun, blooming flowers and green—soon, please. But I did bike three out of four days during this short work week, and started a few extra hill rides to get ready, just in case I do win a slot on RAGBRAI in that lottery.

Thursday morning--Clarence parked behind Warde Hall--nice ride in, even if there is snow blocking the other side of the  bike rack.